Beginning with phpBB 3.2 Release Candidate 2, the phpBB package will include a VigLink extension.

Currently, we rely solely on ads served throughout phpBB.com to fund the project’s expenses, namely: web hosting, legal expenses, software licenses, travel expenses for community events, etc. Our ad revenue has been steadily declining for a long time because the unobtrusive ads we’re willing to serve to visitors are less and less profitable. We have explored a variety of alternate funding options, such as utilizing more profitable advertising or accepting donations, however we feel that these solutions would either be ineffective or result in tangible undesirable effects.

We believe that this is the best solution to our current problem, namely that it provides a necessary revenue stream for the project while not negatively affecting the usability of the phpBB software.

The new extension allows phpBB users to support the phpBB project or alternatively elect to monetize their forums using a service called VigLink. If you enable the VigLink extension, whenever a user follows a link from your forum to any of VigLink’s partner websites and performs certain actions (such as making a purchase), a referral credit will be generated. To be clear, this will only affect existing links and should be entirely unnoticeable. It can also be entirely disabled, at your discretion.

After installation, it will be up to you to pick between disabling or enabling VigLink to help support phpBB or to use your own VigLink Convert account to earn money with your board. In order to accommodate this newly added feature, we improved the overall look of the “Send statistics” page in the Admin Control Panel and extended it to support extensions: